


scour / scar

by ninemoons42



Category: Final Fantasy XV
Genre: Age Difference, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Established Relationship, Fade to Black, Hurt/Comfort, Introspection, Late Night Conversations, M/M, Mixed Martial Arts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-22
Updated: 2018-12-22
Packaged: 2019-09-24 20:58:10
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,178
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17108000
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ninemoons42/pseuds/ninemoons42
Summary: The body can be injured, the mind can be injured, the heart and soul can be injured.Maybe it's possible to cure the first and the second, and maybe it's easy.That last part, though: nothing is ever easy about that kind of recovery.





	scour / scar

**Author's Note:**

> (Written as a holiday fic present; posted 12/23 UTC+8.)

He doesn’t know what wakes him up, this time, another time, in these too-long hours, this never-ending night: all he knows is that before he can even open his eyes he feels like he’s walking on a knife-edge, he feels like he’s braced for a blow and never safe, never just out of range, like there’s nothing left for him but to watch and to wait for the inevitability of pain, the shattering impact into his nerves and into his skin -- and hasn’t he been bruised enough? Hasn’t he been broken enough? Scars running all over him, and the bandages he’s still wearing, in the here and now, and he hates himself for the pained noise -- like the keen and the cry of wounded animals, prey animals, staked out and left to die, waiting to be devoured -- that he tries to muffle in the thin-patched blankets, to no avail.

Out the window, out into the night: and the first thing he hears, that isn’t his own labored breathing, is the distant thud and thunder of explosions. Not the ones that occur on the ground, either, not the ones that are surrounded by screaming, that are followed by sirens or else blank hateful silence. 

Overhead: the explosions rattle through him from somewhere far overhead, he thinks, distant jolt through his abused senses, and he twists himself partway around in the bed and wonders that there aren’t any fire-flowers for him to see -- the showers of brilliant sparks, the massive and temporary blooms of bright stars and sparks of light -- not even a faint reflection for him to catch, not even out of the corner of his eye, and he considers rolling himself back down into his blankets and -- another hitched not-quite-a-sob falls from his mouth despite his best efforts to overcome it, and -- then that’s it, that’s it, he can’t stand this. 

He grits his teeth just for the idea of trying to get up from this bed. The mattress, worn down so much that he can feel the springs pushing up into him, resisting him, and far too close to wearing completely through. The bed frame, its screws and joints and the entire creaking sagging mess of it. The pillows, every single one of them long since pounded flat. This bed is no refuge, it only turns him into a mass of bruises, and it stopped being comfortable the moment he fell into it, and when was that? When had he made it back here? How had he even gotten back in one piece? 

He almost thinks he remembers, but it’s all a blur to him now, nothing more than mumbled words: and what had he been trying to say, in the first place? And to who?

There is no one here in this room to provide him with any kind of answer, or any kind of solace.

Wrist, smelling faintly of menthol and camphor, and still feeling greasy -- not always in the soothing way. The prickle of a cramp in the muscles of his forearm, and the answering pinch of pain, threatening tightening around his lower legs, around his toes. Bandages wound roughly, loosely, around his midsection: and as he finally pushes himself upright with a groan, he catches sight of the crowd of streaks and tracks of bruising up and down his ribs, all over his stomach, and he whines at the idea, nearly doubles over with self-loathing, nearly falls back down and -- no, no, he has to, he has to get up -- 

Up and on his feet, somehow. Unsteady steps, no more than a handful, as he crosses this dingy room that he’s been renting by the month, that he’s been holing up in -- it doesn’t make sense to call it a home, as he doesn’t even leave enough of himself in the cracks and crevices of the place.

Home? What’s that? Maybe he knew what home was, once, but in the here and now there’s nothing about it that he can remember. Not the pattern on the walls in the rooms that must have been his, when he was a child. Not the placement and number of the windows, the doors. Not the presence or the absence of a garden that he could look out on. Not the presence or the absence of faces that were -- if not friendly, then at least familiar, maybe wearyingly so. 

Home must have been something he used to know. 

Now it’s just another one of those places and ideas that he thinks he’s forgotten about. Just another bit of vanished scenery, vanished memory; one more thing to keep running away from.

Steps away from the bed, steps toward the only other door in this cramped place, and he weaves past the shadowed muddled piles of his own clothes and shoes and weapons, strewn around the floor, every kind of hazard and every single one of them self-inflicted, because he can’t even think about picking up after himself. 

He has to brace for the moment when he opens the bathroom door -- blaze of automatic light that makes him cringe, that makes him throw his hand up over his face -- but what is there to defend against? Only the cold harsh fluorescent glow, heartless.

Cold, harsh, like the reflection he wishes he could avoid seeing. Oh, he knows what it’s like, to live in his own skin, to be subject and prey to all of his aches and pains -- he knows what pain does to him, what it’s always done to him. How it etches into him, deeper and deeper and leaving scars, every single time. Scars upon scars.

He can’t even see the blue of his own eyes for all the bruising, all the heavy shadows underneath; he can’t even see the actual shape of his mouth for all the lines radiating from it, the grimace that multiplies and can only deepen.

Not for the first time, he can’t even find anything to linger over favorably, not in his face -- and in the end he turns away from patchy scruff, from the lank hair clinging in kinked strands to his forehead and ears and temples. Turns away because he can’t stand any more of the looking.

Into the shower: he throws the shirt and the briefs and the socks out into the actual room, and -- here he has to brace himself again. Has to grit his teeth again: no way of telling what’s going to come out of the taps, out of the crusted shower-head, and he’s had too many run-ins with water the approximate temperature of icebergs, of ships gashed open and then shattered into snowbound pieces, so he’s wary.

He’s only trying to hope for a little kindness. 

Even if that kindness is no more than a moment of hot water: he’ll take it.

And he does gasp, long shuddering exhale, relief instead of ice gnawing at him when the steam pours out, when the water breaks over him in a scalding rush -- he welcomes the water as it drums heat into his skin, and he tilts his face up into that scouring steaming cloud.

Hot enough that he feels every inch of his injuries anew, the nerves in his body misfiring around lingering pain and this fresh attack -- and at the same time those new sensations, the rising tide of warmth, gives him some kind of sleepy relief. Lets the world recede from him, slow, slow. 

If he’s lucky, there’ll be enough hot water that he’ll be able to -- clean away all the grime that feels like it’s been lodged somewhere deep beneath his skin, deep enough that it’s no longer just on his body. Grime that might have started to migrate into his heart, into his soul, and all the depths of him that he can’t even think about facing. Grime that smells like the blood that he can’t seem to scrub off his sunken knuckles. Blood drawn and taken in bare-fisted fights. His own blood, and his opponents’ blood, mingling into scarlet and then drying into tight brown crusts. 

Down: he opens his eyes to the faint traces of brown, washing away from his hands, washing away down the drain. The relentless smell of hot metal -- not just because of the blood, but also because he’s turning the water up as high as it will go and he can hear the creaking pipes in response, hear the thump and the groan of the water heater lurching slowly into life somewhere inside the wall -- and he loses himself, for a while.

He only comes to, reluctantly, when the water finally starts cooling down -- and reluctantly he blinks past the clouds of steam, past the persistent pink hues rising in the palms of his hands, past the wrinkles in his fingertips.

Slowly, then, he hears -- adjacent sounds. He hears footsteps, moving in the spaces he normally occupies. Footsteps coming closer, and a shadow, blurred out, that he does and doesn’t recognize. 

“Noct -- hey, you alive in there?”

“I think,” he says, and if he doesn’t sag against the nearest corner of the shower enclosure, it’s only because the hot water has left him limp and almost, almost relaxed. 

Relief still feels like claws, like barbed wire, catching in his skin, dragging at his nerves.

This voice, at least, is familiar to him.

Sometimes this voice has been more familiar to him than his own.

And this is the one voice in the world he’s choosing to respond to, now, every time it calls out to him.

“I’m not sure.”

Shape in the door: and before he sees anything else, before he sees the vivid eyes or the deceptively slim build, he sees the freckles. After all, there’s nothing between them right now: not the door that’s hanging ajar, and not even the hint of shower curtains. 

Shadow-drops spattered over fair skin, in the ghostly lines of almost-constellations, almost-galaxies.

And the thing with Prompto is that he’s carrying his own share of scars, too -- even if none of those scars resemble any of Noctis’s. Even if they’re both a little easier and a little harder to notice against his habitual smile -- the expression that draws people closer, like honey draws bees; the same expression that keeps people from asking questions, as though he knows how to hide behind some kind of invisible shield.

A shield that’s not in evidence as he steps aside to make room for Prompto -- and now the shower is good and cramped, and the steady stream of water is starting to sputter and -- 

“Here,” he says, as gently as he can given his still shaken circumstances, and he places his hands on Prompto’s shoulders, steers him to make the most of the shower-head and its continuing flow.

“Thanks.”

Sharp stink of antiseptic that rises only briefly, as Prompto lets the water plaster his hair down -- and then that smell fades away. 

The other thing that washes off of him is -- makeup, Noctis thinks: the heavy rims of his eyeliner, the fading remnants of his lipstick, and Prompto emerges a little bit cleaner, a little bit more like the real him, without the other things he uses to conceal himself from everyone else who might be looking too closely.

Leaving him, Noctis, to see Prompto as he mostly really is.

Mostly.

So he’s gentle, he has to make himself be gentle, when he reaches out to the new-ish scratch-lines in Prompto’s skin: the fading angry red of welts, four lines in parallel, running down from his cheek to his jawline and then continuing over his clavicle, over his chest. “This still hurt?”

“Not as much as my pride, and I don’t have much of that to lose anyway,” and Prompto sounds so flip, so easy about the whole thing, that Noctis can’t help but narrow his eyes, if only a little.

He waits him out -- even when Prompto finds the little bottles of shampoo and conditioner -- that Noctis himself hasn’t even thought of using on this particular night.

Chemicals that smell like someone’s sanitized ideas of flowers, of lemons and amber, lingering on Prompto’s skin even after he winds up having to rinse his hair in completely cool water.

“Sorry,” Noctis mumbles, as he reaches for one of the still-damp towels hanging next to the door, and hands it over.

“Not like I haven’t done this to you, anyway,” is the equally quiet response, and then Prompto’s wrapping his hair to dry. “I don’t mind a little payback. I’d deserve it.”

He follows Prompto out of the shower -- and the lights are on, now, casting the entirety of this little room in garish blue-white -- that includes the damp spot he creates when he half-falls back into the narrow spaces of his unmade bed. His wrinkled sheets, his threadbare blankets, his limp pillows.

“Wasn’t expecting you to be back for a while,” he mutters, to the soft tread of Prompto’s back-and-forthing steps. “They said not to expect you back here, either.”

“They?”

“Aranea, mostly,” Noctis says. “Now that I think about it though. Why would she have even bothered to tell me these things? Should’ve been smelled a rat right there.”

“Oh, her, don’t take it out on her -- I know I was surprised like anything to be making my way back here -- I was half expecting you to be gone, yourself.” Some of the words are muffled and when the bed dips and creaks again, he can see why: because Prompto’s taken one of his own discarded shirts -- no way of knowing how clean it is, or isn’t -- and pulled it on, and its sagging collar exposes a fair portion of his chest to the cooler air of the room. “I’m glad you’re here.”

Hand, Prompto’s hand, wrapping gently around his. 

How does Prompto know to be careful with him, still? How could he want to be gentle? Stroke of Prompto’s thumb against his, on the underside of that grip, slow soothing rhythm over their respective sets of abrasions and bruises. 

“I’m glad you’re here, too,” he says, after a long moment. Winces, because he’s always slow with these words, the things that Prompto probably needs to hear and understand -- and in fact never even asks him for. 

Patience, patience: how can Prompto have patience when Noctis takes too long to even start to decipher his own emotions? Sometimes he feels like he’s a detective of some kind, come far too late to the scene of the crime, long after it’s been breached and contaminated by so many other layers of blood and hurt and painful emotions, stuck with having to look at useless clues and his own mistakes, his own self-inflicted misdirections.

And Prompto, somehow, sticking around so that Noctis can -- find his words, express himself, put all the clues together and come up with some kind of meaning for the whole thing -- it’s not the first time he wonders what he’s getting out of this, out of them. Whatever it is, this thing that they have.

It’s not even the first time his thoughts run along these lines so, again, misdirection -- why is he hyperventilating, now, a little? Why does he do this to himself?

And so he looks over to see where Prompto is: looks over for permission, too, and he gets that kind blank-faced look, open and odd and sweet, and he wants to keep looking at it.

At the same time he can’t stand it -- he’s not sure he deserves the kindness -- he rolls over and he winds up pressing his forehead into the bunched muscles of Prompto’s upper arm, and -- there are arms around him, too, and he’s being tugged closer and this is ridiculous, he’s trying to hide in a boy ten years his junior, a hundred pounds lighter, how is this ever going to work?

Why does he want this to work?

Soft laughter, filtering slowly through the haze of his muddled thoughts.

Not the kind of laughter to make him bristle and cock his fist and swing: just the opposite.

The kind of laughter that warms him almost as much as the water did. 

“Glad to hear it.”

He blinks, blinks, blinks. “Which part of that did I say out loud,” he mumbles against freckled skin, doubtful, half ready to spring away again.

“Why do I want this to work,” and he can hear the smile in Prompto’s words. “Why do you? I want to know, too. I mean, I want this to work. Us. Chasing each other all over the place and always the danger that I have to climb into the ring and -- find you on the other side. How inconvenient would that be? How do I find a way to throw the match without letting anyone catch on that that’s what I’m doing? Because I know you. I know your pride. You wouldn’t bother to throw a match even if it was me on the other side. You’d just set out to win however you could.”

“Wouldn’t fight dirty, if it was you,” he mutters, little caring for the garbled edges around his words. “Besides. You’re making a big deal out of -- mostly nothing. I mean it’s never going to happen. I wouldn’t let it happen, you and me facing each other in a ring. But all right, since you’re already on the topic: all you’d have to do is the thing you already know how to do. Punch me as hard as you can. Taught you how to. Swing, and swing hard -- then you wouldn’t have to worry about anybody throwing the match.”

“I know how that works but you can’t ever expect me to be happy about knocking you out.”

“How do you think I would feel about it?” And it’s -- been a while since the last time anything of the sort has happened, because he tells Prompto where he’s going, sometimes, when he can remember to, and so -- theoretically Prompto doesn’t have to fight in the same venues that he does, something something different weight divisions something -- but he kisses the nearest bit of freckled skin he can find, anyway, even when that means he has to get part of a towel’s edge in his mouth. 

“Noct.”

“Yeah,” and he resists the hand that fits around his cheek, that urges him to look up, but only for a moment.

Because the reward for obeying this small command -- this small request -- is to look into those eyes. Shades of violet and of blue, shadowed with something sweet. The curve of a smile. “Can you tell me?”

“Tell you what.”

“You want to be with me.”

He just tells the truth, again. “Even against every sort of better judgment I could have -- and I don’t have a lot of that, or don’t you know me by now?”

“I’m not sure I’ll ever finish knowing you, and maybe that’s a good thing,” and Prompto sounds both so much younger and so much wiser, even as he also sounds so much more wistful than Noctis can ever remember him, even in these stolen moments of stolen nights. “Even when everyone tells me I’ve got no sense of self-preservation. Whether you’re part of it or not. Does it really matter?”

“Sometimes it feels like it does.”

“Okay, granted, you’re more existential than anyone else I know. Than anyone else I’ve ever been with. And that’s not a whole lot of people so -- again -- what do I know? But -- maybe if I do my best to keep up with you, I’ll learn something about you. And learn something about myself in the process. You ask damn hard questions sometimes. No, a lot.”

He almost laughs. “People generally don’t like me when I ask myself weird questions. I don’t get that. I’m not asking them. I’m asking me.”

“If they can’t fucking keep up, that’s their problem, not yours. And I say that as someone who can’t always keep up.”

“That’s why,” he says, and he levers himself up on one elbow, then. “How much does it bother you? Me being who I am, doing what I do?”

Blink of those lovely eyes -- that then stay closed, and Prompto is tipping his head backwards. 

The towel slithers off his head.

“It bothers me sometimes,” and the words are slow, measured, gentle. “That you stop looking alive until a little after someone punches you hard enough you’re weaving for a bit. Not saying it happens all the time, just saying -- you have your days, you know? And you don’t care when you have your days because I see you having them and, I mean you don’t hide them from me. And I think I know why you have your days. The world’s too much, right? I shout back at the world. I flip it off. You -- shut down, you shut yourself down, you look like you’re the fucking walking dead, and when that happens I can’t even always get a reaction out of you and that leaves me worrying. Wondering if you’ll come back.”

Words hanging between them for a moment, laced with sweetness and something that Noctis might almost call regret. 

So he says, “But I do.” 

What makes those words so hard to say, even he doesn’t know: but he swallows, says it again, elaborates. “You’re the only person I keep coming back to.”

Prompto’s eyes slitting open. Turn of his head, measuring Noctis.

And Noctis wants to hide from those eyes -- and doesn’t.

“Am I?”

“You are. There’s no one else. I just -- I don’t know how long I’m out of it. Every time, it’s different. Every time, it changes. Sometimes it’s easier to come back. Sometimes it’s harder. I don’t know, Prom. I don’t know how it works inside my own head.” 

“Well that makes two of us.”

But there’s nothing mocking about the words, and only relief in the arms that are wound around him, tightening and releasing, and Noctis drops his head, again.

This time he listens to the thud of Prompto’s heart, safe within its confines of flesh and bone and blood -- and maybe sometimes Prompto returns from some fight or another even more bruised than he could have thought possible. Maybe sometimes Prompto throws himself too hard into the fight and comes back more than halfway to dead. 

He does the same thing, and far more frequently, and -- Prompto doesn’t judge him. Prompto lets him have his head, no matter how it might hurt either of them.

“Sorry,” he mutters, again. “It’s not easy, being with me.”

Soft laugh, in response. “Figured that out from the first night. You haven’t scared me off yet.”

“I’m scared I’ll make you leave me.”

“Oh, Noct. I’ll -- I promise I’ll let you know if it ever becomes too much.”

He shakes his head. “You don’t even owe me that.”

“No I don’t, but watch me do it anyway.”

“I’m trying not to let it go too far. By which I mean, I’m trying to be an actual person. Not someone who’ll leave you. Not someone who’ll abuse you. I don’t want to be that person. You don’t deserve that from anyone and you don’t deserve that from me.”

That gets him another small laugh. “Just you try it, Noct, I promise I’ll fucking kick your ass, I’ll knock you down and make sure you stay down.”

“Don’t owe me that either,” he says, “but I would deserve it ten times, twenty times. A hundred times.”

“Something like that.”

What kind of promise is that, he thinks.

The kind of promise only the two of them can make.

The kind of promise only the two of them can understand.

And then -- fingers catching in his hair, pulling gently, just enough to catch his attention -- he blinks, he looks down, he’s being pulled into a kiss that isn’t gentle at all.

Well.

This, at least, is something he can understand: the language that’s spoken without words, that’s only for the two of them, that’s Prompto taking charge of him. Propelling him onto a different knife-edge, the one he’ll walk wide-eyed and willingly.

“Noct: let go,” and the words are bitten into the corners of his mouth. “Let go. Be with me now.”

“Make me,” he says, not a challenge: a plea. “Help me -- turn it all off -- ”

Strange how his heart seems to lift when Prompto laughs. “Fortunately I don’t have to fight you to do that -- ”

“Not fighting,” Noctis says -- and he loses the breath for the rest of it when Prompto seizes him by the shoulder, by the hip -- it’s not quite a throw, the way he does it, but Noctis ends up on his back either way, and he’s grateful, even as he tries to catch his breath. “Don’t want to fight you.”

“Not what I had in mind,” he hears Prompto say, the words steady between them. 

Steady like Prompto’s hands are steady, touching him, mapping him out.

Steady like the needy light in Prompto’s eyes is steady, that he looks up into, that he falls into, helpless and wanting.

**Author's Note:**

> Come talk to me on Tumblr at my FFXV sideblog [@ninemoons42-lestallumhaven](http://ninemoons42-lestallumhaven.tumblr.com/) or at my main [@ninemoons42](http://ninemoons42.tumblr.com/) \-- or, hey, if Tumblr becomes too rotten and we can't talk there any more, there's always Twitter, where I am @ninemoons42.


End file.
